Facebook "King" of Business Marketing

Marketing Facebook in Business

When it comes to connecting with others and letting people know you exist, Facebook is “King” in business marketing. It’s almost got to the stage where if you don’t have a Facebook account you might as well not exist.

Harsh, but true. So if you’re a Facebook novice but for the sake of your business you’d really rather not be, read on to discover how to make the most out of the don of social media networking websites…

Make Friends

Whether you cringe at the idea of going into a new room and talking to new people, or are a total social butterfly. Neither matters in the virtual world because you’ll becoming face to face with no one. So, that said, making friends should be easy, right?

Don’t worry, Facebook friends and real friends are two very different things. You don’t need to know what your Facebook friends get up to on a Friday night, heck you don’t even need to know them personally. Remember – what we’re doing here is building a list of people so you can get your business out there.

If you’ve just opened your Facebook account and so far you’ve got a total of three friends, you’re going to have to do some leg-work. First up, use the ‘find friends’ tool that you’ll see at the top right hand of Facebook.

And here’s where you need to put all feelings of desperation aside because this is not about you, this is about your business. And yes, it’s time to start adding ‘friends’.

Ok so they might realistically be more like acquaintances, people you’ve met once, or a friend of a friend but go ahead and add them because it means more people who’ll get to know about your business.

Find Groups

So you’ve exhausted your friend list – it’s time to try another tactic: groups. For this, you need to think about your business – what are you selling, doing, what interests is it related to?

Once you’ve come up with a few keywords, enter your search words (one at a time) into the Facebook search bar at the top of the page. The next page will show a list of options down the left-hand side, click on ‘groups’. You’ll then be shown a list of groups relevant to the keyword you typed in. Next thing to do – start joining them!

You’ll now belong to a group which is related to your field, and with a whole load of people who’ve also joined and ‘like’ this particular thing.

From now on in you can start posting things to the group wall – but don’t just make it plain old advertising. Try and stick to interesting and fun stuff, or ask questions that might spark off debate.

The more active you are in these groups, the more the group members will see you. And the more often they see your little profile picture popping up, the more likely they are to click on it and see what you’re all about.

Create a Fan Page

Hopefully by now you’re becoming a little more Facebook savvy, you haven’t spammed any of your groups with advertising messages about how great your business is, but you have been participating in group banter.

Ok, so now’s the time to take things up a notch by creating a fan page for your business.

To do this you need to go to the Create a Page page here and choose the category which your business fits in to. If you click on local business or place for example, you’ll be asked to fill in a bit of information about the business in question. From here on in, it’s very user friendly and you shouldn’t have any problems getting to grips with it.

Make People Sit up and Take Notice

Now you’re well and truly embroiled in all things Facebook, how can you make sure people are actually taking notice of what you’re doing?

Yes you’ve been engaging in conversations, sparking thought, and getting involved, but if you want to give your business a boom it’s time to do one thing: run a competition.

Everyone loves a freebie, right? Right. And it’s easy to run a competition on Facebook – you can ask people to simply ‘like’ your fan page to be entered into the prize draw or ask them to ‘like’ it and then recommend your page to a friend for instance. Generally, the bigger the prize the bigger the ask you can make.

Post details of your competition on your wall, on friends’ walls and on your group walls and (if your prize is halfway decent) before long you’ll have scores of people liking your page and spreading the word.

We hope this post has been useful when it comes to the basics of Facebook marketing. If you’ve got any comments or suggestions you’d like to add, please get in touch!

About the Author of Facebook Marketing in Business:

Olivia Lennox, prolific web-writer and and social media viscount, is an avid reader and reporter on online marketing campaigns and best practices. She also blogs on a variety of other online marketing disciplines.